The God Particle Sounds Kind of Like Calypso Music

Last month, the particle that is said to compose the energy field that gives mass to all things, the Higgs Boson particle was discovered due to a number of anomalies in data sets at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland. This is an extremely big deal, and if you weren’t aware of it, you might live in Williamsburg. Still, this singularly-important news feels sort of unsexy, what with the so-called “God” particle being effectively invisible.

Fortunately, there are scientists like Domenico Vicinanza out there, who insist on “sonifying” the anomalous set so we could hear what endowing mass to all physical existence sounds like. “As soon as the announcement was made, we begun working on the sonification of the experimental data,” said Vicinanza, the product manager at Delivery of Advanced Network Technology to Europe in Cambridge. “Sonification worked by attaching a musical note to each data. So, when you hear the resulting melody you really are hearing the data.”

Here’s the Higgs Boson sonification:

Wrap your noodle around that. You are hearing the indicator of a particle which allows all things to have extension in physical reality. And it sounds so…spicy. Like a tango. Science fucking rules!(Photo: Steve Jurvetson/Flickr)